Sunday, April 15, 2007

Greece. Not a bad place at all.

Well we're back from Greece. It was a lovely place to be I must say. The weather was outstanding the whole time we were there. It was bright and sunny with not a cloud in the sky.

Our hotel was great. It was convereted from some old building that was there in there at some point in the 1990's and it was really unique and charming. It was amazing to lie in bed and stare at these stone walls and think: "Someone was livng here 1000 years ago."

We stayed in the the old town of Rhodes which, I didn't quite realize going in, is actually a 100% old medevil town. I was a bit disconcerted at first as it's full of crumbling buildings and parts of it are bascially old ruins. It began to grow on me as the days went by though and by the time I left it I was in love with it. It's got it's tourist trappy type of places but they're a million percent better than the New Town which is just outside the city walls. The New Town is over run with Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Hugo Boss, endless crappy restaurants, Subway (!), and hotels. Basically it's a name brand shopping mall where as in the Old Town there are shops that sell that stuff but it's all small businesses. The Old Town is full of charming places to discover too. It's not very big and maps of the place seem to have been made up by a blind man who has never been there so I thought it was bigger than it was the first few days as I wandered randomly through it.

We found some AMAZING food there. The first night we we went to a restaurant that was good but was, as we found out later, way over priced. We had a conversation with a retired Scottish couple who, it turned out, were staying at our hotel. We were into our appetizer at another restaurant and I saw them out front looking at the menu. I went out to get them just as they were walking away and told them this place was great so they came in and sat by us. We had a great time eating and talking to them for about 3 hours after that. Fantastic time. We ended up hooking up with them on the final day and sitting at another cafe for about 3 hours whilst sipping wine. They were really great people.

The best stuff we saw in terms of sites were all in the Castle of the Knights of St. John. The Castle was HUGE. It was extremely well maintained as well. There was also an archeological museum that was a lot bigger and more impressive than I had expected. It was housed in part of the castle that hadn't been fixed up which added to the "old historical" feel of the place.

I tried to see if there was any scuba diving but apparently that doesn't start for a month or so. Ah well, I'll have to fullfill that dream another day.

Babagenouche and I had a great time poking around, eating great food, getting sun and relaxing.
Babagenouche's Aunt and Uncle were super kind and picked us up at the airport late Saturday. We finished off my vacation (Babagen has another week damn her!) with a lovely breakfast and a wonderful Sunday lunch with the family.

A great 5 days.

I've posted pics on my flickr account.

3 comments:

CoCoCan said...

woow~~
sound good~~
you make me want to travel there~

come to my blog if you have time~
http://cococan.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

How long will this dryspell last my fellow Bloggies?

slaghammer said...

With very few exceptions, (functional) ancient architecture is effectively non-existent in the U.S. The thought of walking through rooms and halls where people roamed a thousand years ago gives me the shivers. I’ll make it there someday.